week 10: pulling it all together

This week we’ll draw together the various activities around ‘algorithmic culture’ through analysing our Tweetorial archive and participating in our block 3 Hangout session.

During week 9, we engaged in some intensive tweeting around a set of core questions that surfaced through our algorithmic play in week 8. During this Tweetorial, algorithms were at work beneath our tweets: collecting, sorting and displaying.

What we have for our week 10 deliberations is therefore an algorithmically derived representation of our block 3 activity; a set of visualisations and summaries that ostensibly depict our educational activity and learning in the previous two weeks. While not formal ‘Learning Analytics’, our tweet archive has performed an automatic analysis that summarises our activity in important ways: it depicts who was ‘present’ and who was ‘absent’; who contributed the most; and which terms were most popular. This week we will be placing this algorithmic analysis under a critical lens, to ask how it functions to represent our Twitter conversations, and what it might reveal or conceal as important.

The two principal tasks this week are to 1) write a blog post critically analysing our Tweetorial Archive, and 2) attend one of our final Hangouts.

For your blog post, you should try to address the following questions systematically:

How has the Twitter archive represented our Tweetorial?

What do these visualisations, summaries and snapshots say about what happened during our Tweetorial, and do they accurately represent the ways you perceived the Tweetorial to unfold, as well as your own contributions?

What might be the educational value or limitations of these kinds of visualisations and summaries, and how do they relate to the ‘learning’ that might have taken place during the ‘Tweetorial’?

There are no specific readings for this week, although you’ll want to draw on the previous block 3 texts to frame your Tweet Archivist blog. In addition, the following blog post might be useful as a prompt for thinking: